Australian Vocational Education and Training Research Association (AVETRA)

ABOUT

Established in 1997, AVETRA is a national, independent association for VET research comprised of stakeholders from the TAFE, university, industry and government sectors (Miller, 2008 ). It has its own constitution and code of practice.

The current AVETRA membership is around 250 – of whom around 15% are outside Australia (Education and Employment References Committee, 2014).

AVETRA conducts a number of activities through the year including: an annual AVETRA conference; the publication of the International Journal of Training Research; the AVETRA newsletter (and research summaries); OctoberVET (an ongoing series of events to showcase VET research); and an ‘Educator Hub’.

Think of the community area as the new 'town square' or office 'water cooler'.

DEFINITION

Social media are computer-mediated technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, career interests and other forms of expression via virtual communities and networks.

The variety of stand-alone and built-in social media services currently available introduces challenges of definition; however, there are some common features:

User-generated content, such as text posts or comments, digital photos or videos, and data generated through all online interactions, is the lifeblood of social media.

Users create service-specific profiles for the website or app that are designed and maintained by the social media organization.

Social media facilitate the development of online social networks by connecting a user's profile with those of other individuals or groups.

[Courtesy of Wikipedia.]

The Community area is for free ranging discussion, a place to meet people and share ideas.

Don't forget to leave comments or like posts by other users.

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FORUMS

Think of the forum area as the formal discussion area, you may also request help here in the technical forum.

DEFINITION

An Internet forum, or message board, is an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages.

They differ from chat rooms in that messages are often longer than one line of text, and are at least temporarily archived. Also, depending on the access level of a user or the forum set-up, a posted message might need to be approved by a moderator before it becomes visible.

Forums have a specific set of jargon associated with them; example: a single conversation is called a "thread", or topic.

A discussion forum is hierarchical or tree-like in structure: a forum can contain a number of subforums, each of which may have several topics. Within a forum's topic, each new discussion started is called a thread, and can be replied to by as many people as so wish.

The news area is for broadcasting general interest articles to the whole community.

DEFINITION

A blog (a truncation of the expression "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries ("posts").

Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order, so that the most recent post appears first, at the top of the web page. Until 2009, blogs were usually the work of a single individual, occasionally of a small group, and often covered a single subject or topic.

In the 2010s, "multi-author blogs" (MABs) have developed, with posts written by large numbers of authors and sometimes professionally edited.